“Come on, you motherfuckers, hit the button.”
One foot at a time, Tom kicked the flip-flops off. They each landed on the floor with a slap. He stepped off the flat steel that was holding his weight and began to die. The muscles in his chest convulsed and Karen began to dance again—ugly and desperate—an aging stripper, a whore. Tom’s struggling seemed to reveal her true self, shedding layers of beauty and falseness. I didn’t look away, though; I still wanted to touch her. I didn’t care what she was as long as she would touch me back. And she would, I knew—I saw it in her eyes, in the split second when her closed eye opened, then shut again in a wink meant only for me.
I got off the bench, put my arms around Tom’s legs, and lifted him with my shoulder.
“Don’t touch me, don’t touch me,” he gasped.
Ricky walked over and hit the panic button.
“What’s the problem?” the woman’s voice asked.
“Some fool’s trying to hang hisself.”
Italian Tom pissed his orange pants and the warmth covered my shoulder. In a matter of seconds, the door slammed open and several guards entered. A female guard climbed the bars and cut the sheet with industrial scissors. Tom and I fell to the floor and the breath left my chest as my head struck the metal edge of the picnic table, then the concrete floor. She cut the noose from around his neck, and I heard his gasp for breath and could feel it as if it were my own. I could feel his sad life on top of me and it was suffocating.
The guards worked to stabilize Tom’s neck as I lay there feeling the cold floor growing warmer with the wetness flowing from my head. I felt myself softening, sinking into the hot springs beneath Kalamazoo.
I tried to sit up but the female officer put her hand gently on my forehead to keep me down. She kneeled in front of me, close enough that I could smell her herbal shampoo. I looked at her name tag, “Lillie.” I wanted to ask if that was her first or last name. I wanted to ask her: Do you like to watch snow come down late at night? When did your parents divorce? What’s your favorite movie? Do you cry when you don’t get mail for a long time? Would you want to be president? Are you happy? Do you hate the news? Does the sight of a jet slicing through the cold, thin air break your heart?
But I couldn’t speak. I was afraid that if I spoke, she’d take her hands from my body. So I lay there and looked at Lillie as the water began to boil and the horses started to run.
A HUMAN NUMBER
The first person I talked to was Kitty-Kat. Kitty-Kat didn’t sound like a Kitty-Kat though, he sounded old and gruff, as if he’d drunk whiskey like water for fifty years. I wrote his number near the dozens of others on the wall next to the phone, but when I woke from a nap the walls were covered with a fresh layer of paint, a pale green over the original orange—like an old bruise or gangrenous flesh.
After Kitty-Kat it was a week before I could get anyone else. I started writing down the numbers in the phone book, on a big ad in the yellow pages for Ritter’s Family Photos. There was no family in the ad, just a house in a valley and a windmill on a hill and a sheep grazing in the front pasture. I wrote the numbers in the open sky above the windmill.
Who is this?
Hey, it’s me, I say. You’re supposed to record your name, so when the person picks up, the generic computer operator asks if you will accept a call from so-and-so from jail. Mine says, Hey, it’s me. Just something I came up with. Not many people know someone with my name, but everyone knows a me.
Heyitsme could be anyone. Some long-missing son, a forgotten uncle, your addict cousin written off as hopeless.
Who is this?
Who is this?
They have to press 1 to accept the charges, spending $2.40 for the first minute, and $0.27 every minute after that, up to fifteen minutes total. Six eighteen is just enough money that during a dead stretch, I worry that no one might answer again.
She read for a long time from Revelation, an old lady with a soft, slow voice: Then I looked, and behold, a Lamb . . . And I heard a voice from heaven . . . These are the ones who were not defiled with women . . . And I saw another angel flying in the midst of heaven . . . And the smoke of their torment ascends forever and ever . . . Whoever receives the mark of his name . . . and behold, a white cloud . . . And something like a sea of glass mingled with fire . . . Let him who hath understanding reckon the number of the beast, for it is a human number . . . I stood on the sand of the sea and saw a beast rising up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns . . . The beast I saw was . . .
I could barely hear her over the two men at our stainless-steel table talking about the inventions that would make them rich when they got out:
1. A desire-transfusion machine that trades an imminent suicide’s wish to die with a terminally ill person’s desire to live. They believed it might be as easy as switching the two people’s blood.
2. Home simple-surgery kits.
3. Anti-tornado bombs.
Little D said from the shower, Thems the dumbest ideas I ever heard.
But I don’t know.
Who is this?
Hey, it’s me.
I don’t know nobody in prison.
I’m not in prison yet. I’m in jail. The two are very different, but people think they’re the same.
Why’d you call?
I’m bored.
So am I. I don’t know what to do with myself since I retired.
What did you retire from?
Had my own auto body shop. Insurance work. Paint and detailing. Or I’d buy totaled cars real cheap and then go and straighten the frame, rebuild it from scratch, basically—pretty good money in that, taking them to the auction. But I had a heart attack and a bypass, so I sold it. Now my wife and me breed these fancy chickens that lay blue eggs.
That sounds nice.
I guess. We’re starting to hate each other. My wife and me. About as much as I hate those friggin’ chickens. I told her, if I can’t work no more then she’s gonna have to get a job, get out of the house during the day. Or I might end up right there with you.
He went on like that for the length of the call, as if we were old friends and he was catching me up on the things I’d missed. He confided that he was thinking about taking up smoking again, despite, or because of, his heart. Either that, or grow roses. Before the line disconnected, I heard his wife enter the room.
Who you talking to? she said.
I have no idear, he said. You want to talk to him? Tell him about your goddamn designer chickens?
I heard the phone move away from his mouth and the silence as he held it out to his wife, just before our time was up and the line clicked dead.
People love to talk—that’s why they answer. I try to listen past their voice and into their home, to the world around them. What TV show is playing? What pets are running around? I once heard a parakeet squawking, “He’s buried in the sandbox.” I listen for the traffic outside, a neighbor playing piano. Once, in a senior assisted-living building, I heard a xylophone being hammered in expert scales. Countless layers of sound make up the world, and I hear it all: voices; vacuuming; traffic through an open window; the hum of washers, dryers, refrigerators, all so slight the sound is barely perceptible.
Kitty-Kat had a busted knee. He said he answered my call because he’d once spent a weekend right where I was—he was drunk and took a swing at his brother-in-law, missed him and coldcocked his sister. What was I there for? he wondered, but never asked me outright. Mostly, he just went on about the right way to roof a house since energy costs were skyrocketing.
He was on Vicodin for the knee, which